How Soon Is Now?

Pain is good.

Art by Logan Heron

This time of year, I always find myself obsessing about…time.

It’s the moments in-between that bother me.

Between jobs, between meals, between paintings.

Between poems, between stories, between songs, between destinations.

Between lovers. (Not in a good way, in a lonely way.)

The in-between: It’s a dreadful place to find yourself. And yet, it’s necessary for the act of finding yourself. It’s how you get from here to anywhere.

But in-between the beginning and the end, you must wait. Wait for the water to boil. The chicken to fry. The bread to rise. The test. The text. The call. The kiss. The punch. The…everything.

We wait and wait and wait. In line after line after both visible and invisible line.

A few minutes or a few hours pass, and that feeling starts nibbling at your skin. You know the one: the fear that you will never reach the front of the line. That the rest of your life will be just one…endless…stretch…of waiting.

Inside the space between now and later, there’s simply too much goddamn time for confidence to dwindle. To rot and become uncertainty. And soon, uncertainty births anxiety—the piercing anxiety of not knowing what’s next.

That persistent, flaming existential question: what will I do with myself now?

I sit and wait for my name to be called by the doctor and wonder: Is there such a thing as too much freedom? Would I be a sober, better, less anxious man if I were confined somehow? Restricted by sickness or madness or chains or a months-long coma?

I’d certainly have less options. Less temptation. Less distraction. Less chance of doing something dumb.

Less would be expected of me. I’d finally have a valid reason for getting nothing done. And in the exceptional event something was accomplished, the achievement, however small, would result in praise, applause, and disgusting adulation.

Maybe I’m just overthinking things. I tend to do that when I have too much time on my hands. My apologies. Sometimes, my mind stretches to ridiculous degrees.

Sometimes, my days drift on by, nice and easy, and for a little while I fool myself into believing bad things have finally stopped happening to me. And then another person I love passes away. And some other person I admire slaps me in the face. And I run out of milk and have to eat a dry piece of tough cake with a glass of cloudy tap water.

But maybe I need awful things to happen. Maybe I need the bad things in my life so the good things can feel as good as they sometimes do.

Maybe these bad things are as necessary as my grandma said they were. After all, they’re just food for the creative beast in me, in you, in all of us. Especially to the poet, the novelist, the painter, the folk singer, the loner, the wanderer—you know, us masochists.

Pain is our favorite medium. Pain is beauty. Suffering equals inspiration.

Pain is good. Agony is God.

Bad things don’t disturb me as much as they used to. Insults, awkward sex, dog bites, bee stings, diarrhea, car wrecks, inflated insurance rates, taxes, mysterious rashes, death, general misfortune—bad things no longer bother me.

Nothing bothers me. I’m talking about those thick chunks of time where nothing happens.

I don’t care what happens next. As long as something happens.

Let it happen. Even if I bleed out to my end and die from it. Let. It. Happen.

Maybe I’ll finally learn my lesson. If not in this life, then in the next.

So let’s stay out late and drink

and yell and dance and fight

and find inspiration

in the worst

parts of town

deep

into a Saturday night.

Even if

we all have to get up early tomorrow.

Especially if

we all have to get up early tomorrow.

Let’s start something.

Even if we never get to finish.

I’m tired of waiting.